You might have seen on the news a couple of weeks ago a video of a guy on a bike sweeping a bunch of stuff off of a shelf into a garbage bag (local copy) (video.hackers.town) and exiting the Walgreens with alacrity on a bicycle. Unsurprisingly, there was a brief wave of outrage, jokes in questionable taste, hellthreads on Nextdoor, and a run on strings of pearls to clutch. Rather than join in those particular fun and games it reminded me of something I saw in the Before Times while out and about.
Once again it is the end of year crunch at work and we're all scrambling to get things done before holiday break. That we even get a holiday break is something that I'm still not quite used to, though I'm certainly not going to complain about it, either. I spent most of the week pulling almost all nighters and cursing specific ways of getting things done that aren't anything like what anyone else does. Oh, well. So it goes. Everybody does it differently, nobody does it right.
Covid-19 cases still going up around the country. Plagues do that. Of course …
This isn't easy for me to write because it involves my mental health. So, if it's not your bag feel free to skip this post.
Helping my mom since her cancer diagnosis has left me in this peculiar state where I don't actually know what I'm feeling. I call it "running on wires," as in, the silicon I'm connected to is running me, and the organics are off doing... something, maybe. My therapist calls it alexithymia, and reading about it that's as good a word for it as any.
I've been fighting with clinical depression for most of my life …
Mom had her first round of chemotherapy last Tuesday. Early that morning I drove her to the Hillman Cancer Center at UPMC, got her checked in, and had to leave as they took her back because, due to the pandemic and generally immunosuppressed state of the other patients in the office I posed a contamination risk. I spent most of the day puttering around the house, fixing stuff up, cleaning, and getting a bit of dayjob work done after dropping her off. Mom spent most of the day hooked up to one IV line or another. Unsurprisingly, it took some …
It seems that every blogger, at one point or other, has to write a thinkpiece about whether or not college is relevant or worthwhile in the 21st century. I seem to have some spare time on my hands, and I haven't bothered t write one yet, so I figured that I might as well. I've been out of college for about seventeen years as I write this, so I haven't completely forgotten everything about the experience. Unfortunately, because I can only speak to my experience in education, this text will be unavoidably skewed in the direction of my perspective.
We're rapidly nearing the end of our first month of quarantine due to the covid-19 pandemic. I've been working from home since the last week of February, which isn't anything particularly new to me because we have mandatory work-from-home days at least once a week at my day job. Coincidentally, a few days in was when our landlord's scheuled demolition and renovation of the kitchen began. This meant that we were down three rooms in the house - no kitchen, no dining room, and no living room - due to having to relocate everything. Lyssa and I also had some amount of …
A couple of weeks back, as part of our continuing education program at my dayjob I ran a hands-on class on locksport, the quasi-science (perhaps art) of picking locks for fun and... well... fun. I'm a security wonk so most of the talks I run have some security content in them, but I wanted to do something that was fairly suitable for everyone (coders and not). So, I got the go-ahead to expense a few more locks and some intro picksets to give away from The Lockpick Shop (no consideration for mentioning or using them, they had what I needed …
As I write this, it's roughly a week before my 40th birthday. I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room tapping away on Windbringer while Lyssa undergoes surgery to remove a cataract from her left (and only working) eye.* When this post goes live on the day of my actual 40th birthday, more things will undoubtedly have happened. I don't know how much time I'm going to have in the next few days, so I guess I'd best take advantage of the spare time I have due to how busy I've been lately.
These beginning-of-the-year posts are always hard to write. Somehow they're always too close to the end of the previous year for everything to have sunk in, but also come too soon for anything to have really happened. I've been wrestling with this post for days (since the third of January, actually) and every time I sit down to work on it, not a whole lot hits my keyboard. When this year started I hit the ground running and haven't had time to sit and really reflect yet. So, I'm going to do the best I can to make this post …
Can you remember ever having lived in a time of peace?
Seriously. Give it a little thought.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I can't think of a single period of time beyond a week or two in all the years I've been alive that I've known anything like peace in the geopolitical sense. I was born in the late 1970's with the horrors of the Vietnam War fading slowly in popular memory. Even though I was too young to really record any memories the Vietnam War was …
